Chapter 22 Max
TWENTY-TWO
Max
It rains for three days.
Not a Florida shower that blows through in twenty minutes, but a real, settled, gray rain that turns the Starlight River silver and keeps the contractors home and fills my suite with the kind of quiet that has a specific texture.
I send Lauren a text on the first morning.
I'm sorry. Genuinely. No expectations. I'm sorry.
She reads it. She doesn't respond.
I go to my parents' house on the third day to bring some documents to Dad and walk into the kitchen to find Kate eating cinnamon cookies at the island.
“Oh,” I say. “Hey.”
She looks at me. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.” I reach for a cookie. We stand there for a moment, the rain steady against the kitchen window.
“I don't know what I did,” I say finally. “Or why she won't answer my texts.”
Kate looks at me steadily. “Yes you do.”
A beat.
“She overreacted,” she says, almost to herself. “And she didn't. Both things are true.” She picks up her coffee. “You asked her to handle the resort's social media.”
“Because she's good at it —”
“And you went to the gallery about her photographs.”
“I was trying —”
“You made a decision about her art. Without asking her,” Kate says, not unkindly. “The one thing she guards most carefully. And in the same conversation you asked her to use her platform for free advertising.” She looks at me. “Do you see how that landed?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“Lauren has spent her entire life being useful,” Kate says.
“To her parents, to brands, to me. She learned a long time ago that people adore her only when she’s giving them something, doing something for them.
Her dad texts when he needs money. The brands get in touch when they need content.
In my opinion, she’s in the entirely wrong profession as an influencer, but that’s a conversation for another day.
And then you —” She pauses. “You asked her to do your social media.
And you'd already called the gallery. You treated her like the help.”
“I wasn't using her.”
“I know that. You know that.” She turns her coffee cup. “She knows it too, somewhere underneath. She needs unconditional love that’s not tied to what she can do for someone.”
“Of course she does,” I say, but immediately know it comes off as defensive.
Steve shuffles over and sits on my foot. I look down at him.
“I was excited,” I say. “About the resort. About her staying. About all of it. I thought we were already a team.”
“She also got a text from her father that night. Asking for money.” Kate turns her coffee cup. “Her family has always leaned on her. It’s part of why she left. And then some brand guy texted. And then you.”
Steve sneezes on my foot.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“At the resort. She’s not running.” Kate looks at me. “She goes to the springs. Early mornings. With her camera. Last I heard she was there getting shots in the rain.”
I reach into the pocket of my rain jacket. The limestone heart is there, which is odd because the last time I touched it, the thing was in the pocket of my jeans.
“What should I do?” I ask.
“No grand gestures,” Kate says firmly. “She doesn’t need more performance.” She looks at me. “She needs someone who actually sees her. The real her. Not the brand.”
“I think I know what to do,” I say.
Kate reaches for one more cookie and stands. “Good. Now can you get me that dog stroller? Your mother bought it and Steve refuses to walk in the rain.”
The next day, I wake before dawn.
Not because of an alarm or a contractor call or an email from the New York office. I wake because the room is too quiet and the bed too empty. I miss Lauren. A lot.
I throw on some cargo shorts and an old T-shirt. Somehow, the heart-shaped rock is in the pocket already, but I don’t question its magic. I slip out of my suite and pause at Lauren’s door. Then I knock.
No response. I power walk down the hall, dash downstairs, and go outside. The resort is silent at this hour. The air is cool and soft in the way Florida mornings can be, the cypress trees still and dark against a sky that’s just beginning to consider color. Thank god the rain has stopped.
I follow the path to the springs. It’s uneven in places but the ground has soaked up all the rain and isn’t muddy, which seems like a small miracle.
I hear Lauren before I see her. Not her voice, but the click and hiss of a camera shutter
She's sitting at the water's edge in shorts, a T-shirt, and the walking cast. Her legs are extended in front of her, the black cast stark against her bare, tanned leg. There’s a sneaker on her other foot.
It’s funny, she’s sitting in the same place she found the stone, that first night. She’s shooting toward the spring, not toward herself, not toward anything packaged or curated. Just the water. She’s capturing the light. Whatever she’s seeing that I probably can’t.
I've watched her photograph things and never seen her expression like this. She’s still, but in a way that’s different from concentration. It’s like she's listening for something rather than looking for it.
The turquoise glow of the water is more visible now than at any other time, the cypress trees reflected in the water, the sky barely pink at the edges. Lauren adjusts her angle a fraction of an inch and goes very still.
Click.
Then she lowers the camera and sits back on her heels, and I can see from the set of her shoulders that she found it. Whatever she was looking for. She exhales and a small smile plays on her lips. She’s so beautiful it makes a lump form in my throat.
I take a step forward. She hears it and turns.
She doesn’t look startled. It’s more like she half-expected me.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
I walk the rest of the way and crouch beside her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About the gallery. I should have asked. I was excited and I didn’t think about the fact that excitement isn’t the same as consent. It’s your work. Your decision.”
Lauren is quiet.
“The social media ask, that’s totally my fault too. I was thinking about what we could do together. I wasn’t thinking about how it would land on top of everything else that was already pressing on you that night. Or how it would come off as me using you.”
“Did Kate tell you about my father’s text?”
“Yes.”
She turns the camera over in her hands. “I overreacted. Or — I reacted to all of it at once, and you got the full force of something that was only partly about you.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize for how it felt.”
She looks at the water. “The gallery thing hurt more. My whole career has been other people making decisions about what I photograph and how and for whom. And then you did it too. Even though you meant well.”
“I know that now.”
“I was saving it,” she says. “Diana called me that afternoon. I was so happy.”
“I hope you’re still going to do it,” I say softly.
“I’m thinking about it.”
I reach into my jacket pocket. The stone is warm from being carried so long. I set it on the ground between us.
She looks at it for a long moment.
“I’ve been carrying it since that first night,” I say. “I know what it means. I’ve just been taking a while to say it.”
“What does it mean?” she asks quietly.
“It means I’m not very good at slow.” I look at her. “What I want is you. Not your Instagram. Not your photography for the resort. You.”
The spring gives off its faint glow. The sky moves from pink to pale gold, and the Florida sun is about to blaze hot and white.
“I love you,” I say. “I should have said it before any of my other plans. I was excited and skipped over the most important part.”
Lauren is very still.
“I want us to explore this,” I say. “Not in business. You should photograph what you love. Take the gallery show. Travel if you need to. Whatever you choose, I’ll be there.”
She finally looks at me. Her eyes are bright in the early light.
“I don’t want to travel,” she says. “I mean… I’ll travel. But I don’t want to run. I’ve been running for a long time and it doesn’t fix anything, it turns out.” She almost smiles. “I think I want to stay. In one place. With —” She stops.
“With?” I say.
“With the guy who carries a heart-shaped rock in his pocket.”
She reaches for the stone and presses it into my palm. I close my fingers around it.
“I love you too,” she says. “I should have said that instead of everything else I said that night after your parents’ dinner.”
“You were upset. You had reason to be.”
She's quiet for a moment, looking at the water. “I've spent a lot of time being angry at people who weren't you and taking it out on the wrong person.”
“I wasn't blameless.”
“No.” She almost smiles. “But you weren't my dad, either.”
I pause. “I realized something else. I should probably stop judging Damien and Kate for falling in love quickly. I seem to have no immunity to it myself.”
She laughs, and it bounces off the water.
We sit at the edge of the spring as the light comes up properly — gold and green through the cypress canopy, the water turning from turquoise to something almost silver and sparkling.
Lauren picks up her camera and takes one more photograph.
A few early morning swimmers drift in, yelping a little at the cool water.
After a while she says, “Can we go find coffee?”
“Absolutely,” I say.
She takes my hand and we walk back up the path toward the Magnolia Grand. The resort is beginning to stir and we see a contractor’s truck in the lot.
At the back door to the resort, she stops.
“I want to be clear about something,” she says.
I wait.
“I’m staying in Cypress Grove. That’s decided. This place has gotten into me and I’m not fighting it anymore.” She looks up at me. “You’re also here, which is not a small thing. But I want you to know it’s not only you. It’s the whole thing. Everything is making me stay. Kate, the vibe. You.”
“Good,” I say. “That’s how it should be.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing exactly.”
“We’re figuring it out,” I say. “Together. That’s enough for now.”
She looks at me for a moment. Something in her face settles.
“It’s a little insane, even by my standards. A month ago I was in Italy.”
“A month ago I was planning to sell this place and go back to New York.”
“And now?”
I look at the resort — the white walls catching the morning light, the cypress trees beyond, the path that leads to the springs. My childhood. My parents' dream. Mine now, in a different way.
“Now I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be,” I say.
She squeezes my hand. Then she turns, and I do too, and the distance between us closes naturally.
Our kiss is unhurried and warm and tastes like possibilities and promise, like the springs and the humid air and something that's been building since the night she handed me a heart-shaped stone and pretended it was nothing.
“Yeah,” she says, when we break apart. “Me too.”